Swapping Caps-Lock and the CTRL Key

For years I have used mostly full sized keyboards that have allowed
me to use my palm on the CTRL key. Since that doesn’t work on my mac,
I’m trying to swap the CTRL and Caps Lock key to see if that helps.

On the mac it is a simple matter of mousing into the keyboard preferences and
choosing to swap those two keys in the modifiers dialogue. While I’m still not
a huge fan of GUI everything over terminal, I have to hand it to Apple for
making it not necessary for the basic config stuff. There’s a bit of a learning
curve for me but I’m working through it.

Having one system out of a handful of my computers behave differently than the
others is frustrating. Not even a week into it and I’m now determined to find a
way to resolve the discrepancy.

So my first idea is to just try and use xmodmap to swap the left CTRL and
the Caps Lock key. Turns out that’s fairly simple. First I created the
following xmodmap script:

Note that I actually found this script on another site so any accolades go to
the person who answered the question here.

When you run this script with:

xmodmap <filename>

It is enabled and viola.

…

After about an hour of using these swapped keys at work, I’ve managed to turn
on Caps Lock a lot so far. It’ll take a while to train my fingers.

While I’m sure I’d be less frustrated if I just disabled Caps Lock all together
and let both keys be CTRL, I’m determined to train my hand to the new habit
first. Perhaps I’ll post an update later or if I decide to follow the same on
my PC at home.